published in the Yorkshire Post 27 March 2009
Frank Sinatra and Muhammad Ali were giants of the comeback. But they would have given their eye-teeth for the reception which Peter Mandelson received on his political comeback last year. Amazed commentators hailed Gordon Brown’s masterstroke.
A few dissenters suggested that it would all end in tears. At a personal level, they cited Mandelson’s magnetic association with controversy and scandal and his propensity for making enemies. At a political level, they wondered if it was wise to restore the brand manager of New Labour just when New Labour ideas were discredited and despised.
But these moaning Minnies were soon silenced by a barrage of sycophantic media reports, many inspired by the man himself. They described his return to his old
Was it all a triumph of hype over experience? Or is Mandelson really the wizard who can save the besieged government from David Cameron’s oncoming orcs? He has now been in office long enough for these questions to be answered, and to assess what he has said and done to help the country recover from depression and give people new reasons to believe in the government.
The answer is: not very much. His achievements are as challenging to remember as Famous Belgians. It has become increasingly hard to find a good story about Peter Mandelson and rather too easy to find a bad one. The most popular thing he has done since his appointment was to have a row with Starbucks.
At the personal level, British voters have learnt that he had a long relationship with a Russian oligarch, that there is renewed speculation about his ability to finance the purchase of a house, and that he has hidden his financial affairs behind a blind trust. No impropriety has been established in any of these issues, but they have reminded voters that he belongs to a world of money and privilege to which they will never be admitted.
At the political level, Mandelson has so far given very few people reasons for gratitude and many more people reasons for alarm or resentment. His Enterprise Finance Guaranteescheme to help troubled businesses has been attacked for being limited in scope, onerous in conditions, slow to deliver and punitive in its interest rates. This newspaper reported that in its first two months the scheme had helped precisely one company in
Although brilliant at talking from the side of his mouth, he is not nearly as good when he has to use the front of it, and frequently sounds condescending and out of touch with ordinary life. He has made a series of ill-judged comments on topical issues. They made him appear to attack the British people for complaining about the recession, appear to suggest that British workers were too lazy to do the jobs being taken over by EU migrants, and appear to recommend that they should go and look for work themselves in the EU. He could reasonably claim to have been misinterpreted – but this is no political apprentice, this is Peter Mandelson, master manipulator of the media. He, of all people, should know how headline-writers work and he should have managed to avoid giving them such easy opportunities.
Within the Cabinet, he has been for the third runway at Heathrow, against extended maternity rights and gender equality legislation, against the EU Working Time Directive (ie for long working hours): all positions which repel many Labour supporters without winning over many other people. His prime function within the government seems to be acting as a free lobbyist for Big Business.
He has embroiled the government in a row over the abstract principle of privatization of Royal Mail, without being able to hold out any specific benefits from it for customers or taxpayers. But he seems proud of the hostility provoked by his policy. Like all New Labour politicians, he assumes that if traditional Labour supporters dislike a policy, it must be right. Royal Mail is the last kick of New Labour’s Basil Fawlty approach to politics: insult and abuse Labour’s regular customers in the hope of winning a better class of clientele.
Mandelson is a protean figure and he may yet re-invent himself. He could acquire a new image and get his name associated with new ideas for government which capture public imagination. Without such a transformation, Mandelson will remain a liability, not an asset, to his party – a figure who continues to inspire distrust, and a permanent reminder of an era of government whose methods were disliked, whose word was unreliable, whose assumptions were misguided and whose economic success was illusory.